did I stop?” Kurt later asked in a note to himself. “There was nothing new in sight. No sign of anything new.” He had made a living off, or a kind of life out of, the new or exotic: Expressionism, Tagore, Fletcherism. Some of the books he published sold briskly right away. But after five years, half of his eight-hundred-copy printing of Kafka’s first standalone book remained warehoused, and many other writers—Musil, Roth, Robert Walser—took years to find a following. Kurt published them just the same, as if each were a bond scheduled to mature ten, twenty, fifty years on, time-lapse vindications of his judgment. “That so many of his authors are now part of [the] canon,” the Times Literary Supplement wrote in 1970, “gave Kurt Wolff the right to claim that he had balanced out any mistakes into which enthusiasm might have led him.”
My grandfather doesn’t specify what accounted for the public’s changing taste. But the Nazis would soon implement the Gleichschaltung, and many of the events that fueled their rise, including the crash of 1929, also jeopardized the book business at large and Kurt’s firm in particular. Together these circumstances left my grandfather, as another German publisher put it years later, “like a deposed sovereign after a revolution.”
He and his old wingman from Leipzig commiserated in an exchange of letters. In March 1930, Werfel urged Kurt to hold fast to what they had once shared. “The Kurt Wolff Verlag was the literary instrument of the last poetic movement to exist in Germany,” he wrote. “Regardless of how highly or lowly esteemed its names are today, one thing is clear, that these were poetic-minded people, the last poets to be sacrificed to the war.— The world we see today is so altered that only a look backward from some point in the future could do justice to this movement to which we both belonged.”
Even as he let employees go over the course of the decade, in 1925 Kurt hired the person who would change the course of his life and, ultimately, make a significant impact on the publishing business in America.
Helen Mosel, my step-grandmother, was born in 1906 in Vranjska Banja, a spa town in southern Serbia. Her mother, Josephine Fischhof, was a Viennese-born journalist; her father, Ludwig (Louis) Mosel, an engineer from the Rhineland, had been sent to the Ottoman Empire to work on the electrification of Turkey. Afraid that Helen and her three younger siblings would be exposed to cholera in public schools, her parents hired private tutors. Helen was reading by age four. Born with one leg shorter than the other, she walked with a slight limp, but that only encouraged her immersion in books and the languages to be unlocked in their pages.
Soon after the outbreak of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and ’13, Helen’s parents split up. Louis eventually abandoned the family entirely, and Helen would vow not to bring his name up again. Josephine moved with the children first to Vienna, then to Berlin, and in 1918, with World War I ongoing and food scarce, to the Bavarian countryside. Amidst this vagabonding childhood and the instability of her parents’ marriage, books helped provide Helen with the ballast to turn herself into a precocious young woman.
In 1920 her mother enrolled Helen as a day student, and one of the first females, at Schondorf, the same Bavarian boarding school Niko would attend. By fifteen she had mastered English and French and read through many of the classics, so the school pushed her several grades ahead. At seventeen she benefited from the patronage of a few wealthy families near Frankfurt, who learned of her through a school connection and hired her as a nanny and governess. One employer—the mother of a schoolmate—also knew Kurt and helped arrange a three-month position as an unpaid trainee with his firm. Helen went on to work as his secretary; as an editor for Pegasus Press, the Paris-based art-book house that had absorbed what was left of Pantheon Casa Editrice; and then, after that firm also ran into financial trouble, as a translator for a UNESCO-like bureau at the League of Nations in Geneva.
By the fall of 1928, Helen’s name appears more and more often in Kurt’s diary, in entries datelined Grenoble, Menton, Nice, Paris. For much of that year and the next, the two traveled together through France, as well as England, Spain, Switzerland, and North Africa. In letters to her family she makes clear that a love affair has begun, albeit one encumbered by uncertainty. Kurt continued to avail himself of a range of women, most of higher social standing and from more comfortable circumstances than those of his penniless, twenty-two-year-old protégée. Helen had to content herself with “scraps of time,” she wrote her brother Georg in March 1930—“torn, secret, every word heartfelt, but always knowing the car could stop at the corner a couple of minutes from now and it will all be over.”
As she realized how much Kurt was beginning to rely on her emotionally, Helen more firmly reconciled herself to his liaisons with other women. “It’s better to spend one week a year with someone like [Kurt], and the rest alone, than to compromise and not be alone for the whole year,” she wrote Georg the following September. “One doesn’t need to own one’s loved one; one has to love that person properly, so as to know each other, to be indestructibly connected by the power of emotion—then there’s no distance, no jealousy, no begrudging.” By the summer of 1931, Helen—pictured here during the early thirties in the south of France—had become the closest Kurt then had to a permanent partner.
During their travels around Europe, Kurt and Helen had avoided Germany, which was “already gloomy and sickening,” Kurt wrote Walter Hasenclever in November 1931. “You can detect it within the first five minutes . . . [a] doomsday mood that has become a common mass psychosis.” Otherwise, Kurt wrote Werfel, “I rest, swim, go for walks. In the fall when fully rested, I may think about what to do next.”
But what to do next was already weighing on him. Through the late twenties, eating and drinking too much, Kurt had put on almost thirty pounds. In letters he was now bemoaning his “agitation” and “debilitating fatigue.” To be so far from the arena was “paralytically exhausting . . . infinitely more difficult than any clearly defined active task.” In March 1931, he relayed to a friend, “how much I yearn for a reasonable job, commensurate with my capabilities and skills.”
So when Kurt and Helen found their way to Berlin in early January 1933, it was specifically to pursue an opportunity for him with the foreign ministry’s Cultural Policy Department, a forerunner of the modern-day Goethe Institute. Moving into a pension on the Kurfürstendamm, they spent what would turn out to be their last weeks in Germany until after the war. Kurt made several visits to the dentist. He and Helen checked out apartments. They socialized with friends who shared their fear that the Nazis would gin up some pretext to abolish any check on their seizure of power. Roth, the former Kurt Wolff Verlag author, was then taking note of what he called the “periodical forest” sprouting in the kiosks of Potsdamer Platz: “The saplings are called the Völkischer Ratgeber, the Kampfbund, the Deutscher Ring, the Deutsches Tagblatt, and all are marked with the inevitable swastikas cut deeply these days into every bark.”
If Kurt’s Jewish ancestry wasn’t enough to attract the Nazis’ attention, his patronage of “degenerate” art and literature ensured his status as their enemy. So with Hitler’s installation as chancellor on January 30, the cultural post with the foreign ministry became a nonstarter. Defeated, Kurt soon relocated with Helen from their Ku’damm pension to an artsy neighborhood in Friedenau, into the furnished apartment Hasenclever had just abandoned when he chose to light out for France. The plate by the doorbell was graced with the name of another prior tenant, a Sigrid Engström, whose “Aryan” appellation seemed to promise protection from incursions by SA thugs. “We are now in the midst of fascism,” Helen wrote her brother on February 17, the day they moved in. “Have you heard Hitler on the radio? It’s enough to make you cry. . . . I look forward to my arrest for impolitic statements about ‘the Führer,’ because one of these days I won’t be able to keep my mouth shut.”
Nine days later Helen wrote her brother again, declaring that National Socialism promised a “lapse into barbarism,” under which she could scarcely imagine “room to live for a halfway decent person.” She added a diagnosis: “The original problem of the German people is that what is real is not enough for them. They don’t adapt to what is given; life leaves them bored, thus they throw it away. . . . Those for whom normalcy is insufficient always create chaos and destruction.”